


No gate, no lock, no bolt

by rosepetalfall



Series: Shakespeare's Sister - Genderswapped History Boys [1]
Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - All Media Types, History Boys - Bennett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 15:48:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepetalfall/pseuds/rosepetalfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Posner is a dancer and looks the part. She’s lithe, like in the Grecian myths, and has long hair she used to plait, or do up in a bun. Nowadays, it’s mostly some haphazard pins holding it all back from her small face.</p><p>-</p><p>All the boys if they had been girls. A look at a genderswapped History Boys. </p><p>Edited and reposted from livejournal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No gate, no lock, no bolt

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this brilliant picspam: http://curlybeach.livejournal.com/134642.html?page=1#comments
> 
> The girls' first names are: Donna Scripps, Davinia "Daisy" Posner, Sara Dakin, Adila "Adi" Akhtar, Jamie Lockwood, Antonia "Toni" Timms, Petra Rudge, and Christa Crowther. Basically the exact female equivalent to their canon male names.

_Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind._ \- Virigina Woolf, _A Room of One's Own_

-

1.

It can be difficult, being Dakin’s best mate. There are numerous reasons for this, but one of them is that she is gorgeous (beautiful doesn’t seem entirely the correct word, though people will call her that as well, and often). Scripps thinks one day, that Dakin looks like luxury. She writes that down, in one of her notebooks. She isn’t entirely sure what she means, but she does mean it. Dakin works summers, like the rest of them, but she has endlessly long hair, always shining and flowing, like in the shampoo adverts. People will always look at Dakin first.

Scripps doesn’t mind most days, honestly. She’d rather be in the background a bit anyway. People will say things, do things, that they wouldn’t have otherwise, if she’d been more imposing. (She thinks it's a bit like how being an anthropologist is meant to work.) And besides, she’s more than decent looking herself, if her mum and the boy at the butcher’s shop are to be trusted.

Posner tells her once that she looks like the girls in the films who make their own happy endings. Posner tells her, “I bet you would look dashing in a trench coat. You would walk around London in the fog in your trench coat and carry a red leather notebook and sit in St. Paul's, surrounded by lovely strangers.” Scripps thinks perhaps Posner needs to watch some more modern cinema, but she also knows it was meant as a compliment. Posner can talk dreamy-eyed for hours around a subject, but by now Scripps can translate pretty well. 

 

2.

Akthar is Posner’s best mate. She is also sometimes Crowther’s.

She once overheard a girl in the year above saying, “Well, it makes sense, them sticking together. They’re, well, rather different, aren’t they?” about her. She wasn’t sure whether they were talking about her and Daisy or her and Christa, but she runs by, knocking over the girl’s bag anyway. She doesn’t shout sorry back down the hall because she’s not. Her mum wants her to behave (she's the eldest and has to act accordingly), so she doesn’t tell and hopes it doesn’t get back to her. Her mum would secretly be proud (she left home and her mother and her brothers and sisters and began again from the ground up; there's no kind of courage in the battles they learn about to rival that), she thinks. It’s not worth the lecture though.

Akthar's not an angry girl and everyone will say she's more or less well-mannered (hard to tell, with their class, what constitutes a trouble-maker, per se) but there are some things that require a response, is all.

 

3.

Lockwood didn’t like Timms quite at first. But then she’d shared her chocolate and done a spot on impression of Mr. Parsons, the science teacher, and Lockwood had decided she was more than fine after all.

Timms is good at making friends, at generally gathering the good will of others. She’s mostly harmless, people think, in spite or perhaps because of the humor. It could bother her, this thinking, but really, there’s no reason to be so serious about it all. After all, she gets good enough marks in school, really good even, or she wouldn’t be able to keep up. So if she and Lockwood get into a few, ah, entanglements with authority figures on occasion, it’s all just in good fun.

Lockwood is going to be a rock star anyway, so she needs to be prepared for such shenanigans. As for Timms, she hasn’t the slightest idea what she wants to be. She thinks she’ll start by not becoming her mum.

 

4.

Rudge would like to play football, she thinks. She used to play rugby sometimes, with the boys, but then she’d reached a certain age and she’d stopped. Her mum had worried. Rudge doesn’t have much use for being lady-like but it’d gotten to the point where the boys had been afraid to knock her too hard, and there wasn’t a point if she wasn’t really playing.

They stopped being afraid a few years later, at least when it came to fondling, behind the rugby stands.

Rudge doesn’t get a reputation, except as an exceptional player. She’s not a lady, but then she’s not Dakin either, pulling in all the boys with a thrill. Which is alright in her book.

She’s not like the rest, but she’s not stupid, and she has plans. She knows how to be decent and hard working and satisfied with it. People can underestimate her but the truth is she finds her answers quickly enough, and gets them right too.

 

5.

Crowther sometimes day dreams about being an actress. She's talented enough and thinks she could manage it, trodding the boards. She's less interested in the thought of doing films, though it's more glamourous and of course she wouldn’t pass up the chance. She’d like to have a captive audience right in front of her. She enjoys the bits of nonsense they memorize in Hector’s class because of that. It’s all useless stuff of course, but so are a lot of the things they do.

Anyway, most likely she’ll do something more practical than acting. She’d like to get bloody well paid for whatever it is she does. And she’s not wasting her time and effort for an off chance at failure. Because when she leaves Sheffield, she isn’t coming back.

She’s the first to learn to drive a car.

 

6.

Dakin impresses people. She always has. She’s clever, and she’s good looking. She thinks that sometimes she intimidates boys, but that’s why she prefers them older anyway. There’s rather a dearth of pickings in grey old Sheffield and Dakin is altogether eager to move on, for there must be better, out there.

It’s not that she wants Oxford specifically, though of course it's Oxford and she couldn't no. Rather, she won’t settle now that it’s a possibility. Oxford will be her ticket to a greater world. If names count, then Dakin will collect them, repossess them, charm them. She does like a job well done, and if it happens to make Miss Irwin smile like a secret, all the better. The woman’s indecently difficult to please and Dakin’s not sure she likes it. She does like winning though. And it just so happens she's very good at winning. She doesn’t plan on that changing.

 

7.

Posner is a dancer and looks the part. She’s lithe, like in the Grecian myths, and has long hair she used to plait, or do up in a bun. Nowadays, it’s mostly some haphazard pins holding it all back from her small face. To be fair, of course, she has had rather more on her mind than fixing her hair recently, and it’s not messy. Her mother wouldn’t let her go out with her hair unbrushed anyway.

She isn’t, she thinks, pretty. Not like Adi, or Donna. And she’s not leather and smoke striking like Lockwood, and she’s not the type of breath taking that Dakin seems to own. She’s something else.

Scripps asks her, once, whether she'd like to dance professionally and Posner stares. She has been dancing since she was four and _en pointe_ since she was thirteen (right after her bat mitzah, like a confirmation of her womanhood) but she stopped harboring fantasies of joining the Royal Ballet ages ago. (She is from Sheffield and goes to a local studio.) She can sing and she can dance and she can act but everyone must have some half useless talents hidden away somewhere, even Headmistress Felix.

“Professionally?” Posner repeats. "Well, that's not very likely, is it?" The time for that has past, and she would have needed money and better pain endurance.

Scripps looks up and says, “You know, I always fancied you’d make a really great Giselle.”

“I’d make a really excellent dead girl, then?”

“Oh, Daisy,” Scripps murmurs, half reproachful, half wistful, “I only meant it as a compliment.”

“Yes,” Posner had forced herself to smile, “I know.”

No, she’s not pretty, but she doesn’t think she’s exactly forgettable either.


End file.
